Life is never dull on the Rim

In addition to all the other games I’ve been playing lately, RimWorld has also been getting some attention. Despite having spent 260+ hours in the game, I have yet to actually complete a single scenario. Completing a scenario means that you’ve managed to build your own spaceship or traveled to a downed spaceship that a friendly AI told you about, with the end result of getting your colonist off the planet. With that in mind, I have returned to the game with the goal of doing just that before the next alpha release.

Boreas-by-the-sea of the faction Hinterland began as the standard tribe scenario of five colonists. I’ve been playing this colony for quite a while now; it currently has 16 colonists, is in the Industrial Age, and has electricity.

I’ve been a fan of mountainous maps for a while for a couple reasons, one of them being that it’s easy to set up starting defenses. You just find an area that’s mostly surrounded by stone and build a few walls to fill in the gaps. Having one side of the map completely covered in the mountains also means that you never have to worry about enemies spawning there. In the case of Boreas-by-the-sea, I decided to try a coastal mountain map for the first time and found that it works even more to my advantage. The deep ocean water is impassible so what forms another natural barrier that enemies can’t spawn on. The sandy beaches are also a great location to put wind turbines because they’re large open areas where you never have to worry about trees growing in the way. I also have a few mods that let me put the area to even more use, particularly Water Power which adds tidal electricity and Basic Bridges which (obviously) lets me build bridges across water (and has a fishing add-on for extra food).

I’m particularly happy with the way the colony’s common room turned out. The fridges keep meals in an easily accessible place, the radio provide some soothing music, it has some cool egg-shaped chairs from RIMkea, there’s a gallery of paintings to look at, and the colored LED lights look great above the pool table.

The comms room is looking pretty classy with the fountain and hedges; I mean, we have to impress wherever we’re trading with. The vault next to it had more silver than I know what to do with.

We went through a lot of cloth making sure our animals had nice comfortable beds, but considering how much wool and milk the muffalos provide and how much are smarter animals haul around, it was worth it.

Our prisoner cells are pretty swanky as well, what with having their own fridges and en suite bathroom.

One of my new favorite mods is ED-ShieldsBasic, which adds much larger versions of the personal shields. The use of a lot of power and can eventually be worn down but being able to shoot enemies without them being able to hit you is a fantastic advantage.

The Centralized Climate Control mod was a little difficult to figure out at first, but I eventually got to work and now all the rooms are pretty easy to keep at the same temperature. I set it up in an ancient structure filled with cryptosleep caskets (after “evicting” the previous tenants) because I didn’t want to remove the caskets but I wanted to use the large room for something.

Getting this far into the game after starting as a tribe hasn’t been the smoothest ride but it’s certainly been an interesting experience. Raids have been plentiful, although some are more effective than others. The one where they were fruitlessly throwing molotovs in the rain and eventually just gave up and went home was one of the funnier ones.

There was a toxic fallout event that happened fairly early on in the game, which could have been deadly for us because it kills all crops and wildlife. Luckily I knew from watching YouTube videos best thing to do was to stay under roofed areas, leaving only to retrieve the animal corpses for food. Apparently eating toxic flesh does not hurt your colonists in any way.

Also impossible to forget is the time when a psychic ship landed right in our fields, or the time when a toxic ship landed on our beach only to be followed by another psychic ship that ended up right next to it.

This colony has also seen its fair share of man-hunting animal packs. Everything from elks…

…to bears…

…to elephants (So. Much. Blood.)…

…to my personal favorite, cows.

But it hasn’t been all bad. We haven’t lost many colonist. We have some pets with awesome names like Buster the warg, Moustache the timber wolf, and Killer the arctic fox. There’s even been a wedding or two.

As well, the teaching lessons (courtesy of Colony Leadership) must be mind-blowing because everyone wants to attend them, even the traders that just happened to be in our colony at the time.

The good news is that the colony is progressing at a good pace and I think I’ll be able to reach my goal in the not-too-distant future. I just hope that the storyteller AI doesn’t throw too many more curve balls my way.

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2 comments

I so want an updated graphical version of dwarf fortress. Everytime I mess around in RimWorld I re-download DF only to not get anywhere with it (again). These games are great because of the randomization and having no clue what could happen next!